Mona Simpson will read excerpts from her forthcoming novel The Wrong Girl and will then be joined by Joanna Scott, UR Professor of English, for a discussion.

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Mona Simpsonn was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, then moved to Los Angeles a young teenager. Her father was a recent immigrant from Syria and her mother was the daughter of a mink farmer and the first person in her family to attend college. Simpson went to Berkeley, where she studied poetry. She worked as a journalist before moving to New York to attend Columbia’s MFA program. During graduate school, she published her first short stories in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review and Mademoiselle. She stayed in New York and worked as an editor at The Paris Review for five years while finishing her first novel, Anywhere But Here. After that, she wrote The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, My Hollywood, and Casebook.

Her work has been awarded several prizes: A Whiting Prize, A Guggenheim, a grant from the NEA, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Lila Wallace Readers Digest Prize, a Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, Pen Faulkner finalist, and most recently, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Mona's latest novel, Commitment, is on sale now.

The Public Lecture Series is presented by the University of Rochester Humanities Center.